The Anarchist Library: Murray Bookchin Libertarian Municipalism An Overview a4

Murray Bookchin

Libertarian Municipalism:
An Overview

1991

The Anarchist Library

Contents

A Civic Ethics 3

Means and Ends 4

Confederalism 5

Municipalizing the Economy 7

Addendum 9

2

Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social recon-
struction — I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups,
and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed — is
their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits es-
tablished by the status quo.

Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for elec-
toral office, that offer vacuous programs for "social justice" to attract a nonde-
script "electorate." Once in office, their programs usually turn into a bouquet
of "compromises." In this respect, many Green parties in Europe have been
only marginally different from conventional parliamentary parties. Nor have so-
cialist parties, with all their various labels, exhibited any basic differences from
their capitalist counter parts. To be sure, the indifference of the Euro- American
public — its "apoliticism" — is understandably depressing. Given their low
expectations, when people do vote, they normally turn to established parties if
only because, as centers of power, they cart produce results of sorts in practical
matters. If one bothers to vote, most people reason, why waste a vote on a new
marginal organization that has all the characteristics of the major ones and that
will eventually become corrupted if it succeeds? Witness the German Greens,
whose internal and public life increasingly approximates that of other parties in
the new Reich.

That this "political process" has lingered on with almost no basic alteration
for decades now is due in great part to the inertia of the process itself. Time
wears expectations thin, and hopes are often reduced to habits as one disap-
pointment is followed by another. Talk of a "new politics," of upsetting tradi-
tion, which is as old as politics itself, is becoming unconvincing. For decades, at
least, the changes that have occurred in radical politics are largely changes in
rhetoric rather than structure. The German Greens are only the most recent of
a succession of "nonparty parties" (to use their original way of describing their
organization) that have turned from an attempt to practice grassroots politics
— ironically, in the Bundestag, of all places! — into a typical parliamentary
party. The Social Democratic Party in Germany, the Labor Party in Britain,
the New Democratic Party in Canada, the Socialist Party in France, and oth-
ers, despite their original emancipatory visions, barely qualify today as even
liberal parties in which a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a Harry Truman would have
found a comfortable home. Whatever social ideals these parties may have had
generations ago have been eclipsed by the pragmatics of gaining, holding, and
extending their power in their respective parliamentary and ministerial bodies.

It is precisely such parliamentary and ministerial objectives that we call
"politics" today. To the modern political imagination, "politics" is precisely a
body of techniques for holding power in representative bodies — notably the
legislative and executive arenas — not a moral calling based on rationality,
community, and freedom.

A Civic Ethics

Libertarian municipalism represents a serious, indeed a historically fundamental
project, to render politics ethical in character and grassroots in organization.
It is structurally and morally different from other grassroots efforts, not merely

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rhetorically different. It seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of au-
thentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism
and its mystification of the "party" mechanism as a means for public represen-
tation. In these respects, libertarian municipalism is not merely a "political
strategy." It is an effort to work from latent or incipient democratic possibilities
toward a radically new configuration of society itsclf-a communitarian society
oriented toward meeting human needs, responding to ecological imperatives,
and developing a new ethics based on sharing and cooperation. That it involves
a consistently independent form of politics is a truism. More important, it in-
volves a redefinition of politics, a return to the word's original Greek meaning
as the management of the community or polis by means of direct face-to-face
assemblies of the people in the formulation of public policy and based on an
ethics of complcmcntarily and solidarity.

In this respect, libertarian municipalism is not one of many pluralistic tech-
niques that is intended to achieve a vague and undefined social goal. Democratic
to its core and nonhicrarchical in its structure, it is a kind of human destiny, not
merely one of an assortment of political tools or strategies that can be adopted
and discarded with the aim of achieving power. Libertarian municipalism, in
effect, seeks to define the institutional contours of a new society even as it
advances the practical message of a radically new politics for our day.

Means and Ends

Here, means and ends meet in a rational unity. The word politics now expresses
direct popular control of society by its citizens through achieving and sustain-
ing a true democracy in municipal assemblies — this, as distinguished from
republican systems of representation that preempt the right of the citizen to
formulate community and regional policies. Such politics is radically distinct
from statecraft and the state a professional body composed of bureaucrats, po-
lice, military, legislators, and the like, that exists as a coercive apparatus, clearly
distinct from and above the people. The libertarian municipalist approach dis-
tinguishes statecraft — which we usually characterize as "politics" today — and
politics as it once existed in precapitalist democratic communities.

Moreover, libertarian municipalism also involves a clear delineation of the
social realm — as well as the political realm — in the strict meaning of the
term social: notably, the arena in which we live our private lives and engage
in production. As such, the social realm is to be distinguished from both the
political and the statist realms. Enormous mischief has been caused by the in-
terchangeable use of these terms — social, political, and the state. Indeed, the
tendency has been to identify them with one another in our thinking and in the
reality of everyday life. But the state is a completely alien formation, a thorn
in the side of human development, an exogenous entity that has incessantly
encroached on the social and political realms. Often, in fact, the state has been
an end in itself, as witness the rise of Asian empires, ancient imperial Rome,
and the totalitarian state of modern times. More than this, it has steadily in-
vaded the political domain, which, for all its past shortcomings, had empowered
communities, social groupings, and individuals.

Such invasions have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, the conflict between the
state on the one hand and the political and social realms on the other has been

4

an ongoing subterranean civil war for centuries. It has often broken out into
the open — in modern times in the conflict of the Castilian cities (comuneros)
against the Spanish monarchy in the 1520s, in the struggle of the Parisian
sections against the centralist Jacobin Convention of 1793, and in endless other
clashes both before and after these encounters.

Today, with the increasing centralization and concentration of power in the
nation-state, a "new politics" — one that is genuinely new — must be structured
institutionally around the restoration of power by municipalities. This is not
only necessary but possible even in such gigantic urban areas as New York
City, Montreal, London, and Paris. Such urban agglomerations are not, strictly
speaking, cities or municipalities in the traditional sense of those terms, despite
being designated as such by sociologists. It is only if we think that they are
cities that we become mystified by problems of size and logistics. Even before
we confront the ecological imperative of physical decentralization (a necessity
anticipated by Frederick Engels and Peter Kropotkin alike), we need feel no
problems about decentralizing them institutionally. When Francois Mitterand
tried to decentralize Paris with local city halls a few years ago, his reasons were
strictly tactical (he wanted to weaken the authority of the capital's right-wing
mayor). Nonetheless, he failed not because restructuring the Large metropolis
was impossible but because the majority of the affluent Parisians supported the
mayor.

Clearly, institutional changes do not occur in a social vacuum. Nor do they
guarantee that a decentralized municipality, even if it is structurally democratic,
will necessarily be humane, rational, and ecological in dealing with public affairs.
Libertarian municipalism is premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and
ecological society, a struggle that depends on education and organization. From
the beginning, it presupposes a genuinely democratic desire by people to arrest
the growing powers of the nation-state and reclaim them for their community
and their region. Unless there is a movement — hopefully an effective Left Green
movement — to foster these aims, decentralization can lead to local parochialism
as easily as it can lead to ecological humanist communities.

But when have basic social changes ever been without risk? The case
that Marx's commitment to a centralized state and planned economy would
inevitably yield bureaucratic totalitarianism could have been better made than
the case that decentralized libertarian municipalities will inevitably be authori-
tarian and have exclusionary and parochial traits Economic interdependence is a
fact of life today, and capitalism itself has made parochial autarchies a chimera.
While municipalities and regions can seek to attain a considerable measure of
sclf-aufficiency, we have long left the era when self-aufHcient communities that
can indulge their prejudices are possible.

Confederalism

Equally important is the need for confederation — the interlinking of com-
munities with one another through recallable deputies mandated by municipal
citizens' assemblies and whose sole functions are coordinative and administra-
tive. Confederation has a long history of its own that dates back to antiquity
and that surfaced as a major alternative to the nation state. From the Amer-
ican Revolution through the French Revolution and the Spanish Revolution of

5

1936, confcdcralism constituted a major challenge to state centralism. Nor has
it disappeared in our own time, when the breakup of existing twentieth-century
empires raises the issue of enforced state centralism or the relatively autonomous
nation. Libertarian municipalism adds a radically democratic dimension to the
contemporary discussions of confederation (as, for example, in Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia) by calling for confederations not of nation-states but of munic-
ipalities and of the neighborhoods of giant megalopolitan areas as well as towns
and villages.

In the case of libertarian municipalism' parochialism can thus be checked not
only by the compelling realities of economic interdependence but by the com-
mitment of municipal minorities to defer to the majority wishes of participating
communities. Do these interdependencies and majority decisions guarantee us
that a majority decision will be a correct one? Certainly not — but our chances
for a rational and ecological society are much better in this approach than in
those that ride on centralized entities and bureaucratic apparatuses. I can-
not help but marvel that no municipal network has been emergent among the
German Greens, who have hundreds of representatives in city councils around
Germany but who carry on a local politics that is completely conventional and
self enclosed within particular towns and cities.

Many arguments against libertarian municipalism — even with its strong
confederal emphasis derive from a failure to understand its distinction between
policy-making and administration. This distinction is fundamental to liber-
tarian municipalism and must always be kept in mind. Policy is made by a
community or neighborhood assembly of free citizens; administration is per-
formed by confederal councils composed of mandated, recallable deputies of
wards, towns, and villages. If particular communities or neighborhoods or a
minority grouping of them choose to go their own way to a point where human
rights are violated or where ecological mayhem is permitted, the majority in
a local or regional confederation has every right to prevent such malfeasances
through its confederal council. This is not a denial of democracy but the as-
sertion of a shared agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the
ecological integrity of a region. These rights and needs are not asserted so much
by a confederal council as by the majority of the popular assemblies conceived as
one large community that expresses its wishes through its confederal deputies.
Thus policy-making still remains local, but its administration is vested in the
confederal network as a whole. The confederation in effect is a Community of
communities based on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives.

If libertarian municipalism is not to be totally warped of its form and di-
vested of its meaning, it is a desideratum that must be fought for. It speaks to
a time — hopefully, one that will yet come when people feel disempowered and
actively seek empowerment. Existing in growing tension with the nation-state,
it is a process as well as a destiny, a struggle to be fulfilled, not a bequest granted
by the summits of the state. It is a dual power that contests the legitimacy of
the existing state power. Such a movement can be expected to begin slowly,
perhaps sporadically, in communities here and there that initially may demand
only the moral authority to alter the structuring of society before enough inter-
linked confederations exist to demand the outright institutional power to replace
the state. The growing tension created by the emergence of municipal confed-
erations represents a confrontation between the state and the political realms.
This confrontation can be resolved only after libertarian municipalism forms the

G

new politics of a popular movement and ultimately captures the imagination of
millions.

Certain points, however, should be obvious. The people who initially enter
into the duel between confcdcralism and statism will not be the same human
beings as those who eventually achieve libertarian municipalism. The movement
that tries to educate them and the struggles that give libertarian municipalist
principles reality will turn them into active citizens, rather than passive "con-
stituents." No one who participates in a struggle for social restructuring emerges
from that struggle with the prejudices, habits, and sensibilities with which he
or she entered it. Hopefully, then, such prejudices — like parochialism — will
increasingly be replaced by a generous sense of cooperation and a caring sense
of interdependence.

Municipalizing the Economy

It remains to emphasize that libertarian municipalism is not merely an evocation
of all traditional antistatist notions of politics. Just as it redefines politics to
include face-to- face municipal democracies graduated to confederal levels, so
it includes a municipalist and confederal approach to economics. Minimally, a
libertarian municipalist economics calls for the municipalization of the economy,
not its centralization into state-owned "nationalized" enterprises on the one
hand or its reduction to "worker-controlled" forms of collcctivistic capitalism
on the other. Trade-union control of "worker controlled" enterprises (that is,
syndicalism) has had its day. This should be evident to anyone who examines the
bureaucracies that even revolutionary trade unions spawned during the Spanish
Civil War of 1936. Today, corporate capitalism too is increasingly eager to
bring the worker into complicity with his or her own exploitation by means of
"workplace democracy." Nor was the revolution in Spain or in other countries
spared the existence of competition among worker-controlled enterprises for raw
materials, markets, and profits. Even more recently, many Israeli kibbutzim
have been failures as examples of nonexploitative, need-oriented enterprises,
despite the high ideals with which they were initially founded.

Libertarian municipalism proposes a radically different form of economy one
that is neither nationalized nor collectivized according to syndicalist precepts.
It proposes that land and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of
the community more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and
their deputies in confederal councils. How work should be planned, what tech-
nologies should be used, how goods should be distributed are questions that
can only be resolved in practice. The maxim "from each according to his or her
ability, to each according to his or her needs" would seem a bedrock guide for an
economically rational society, provided to be sure that goods are of the highest
durability and quality, that needs are guided by rational and ecological stan-
dards, and that the ancient notions of limit and balance replace the bourgeois
marketplace imperative of "grow or die."

In such a municipal economy — confederal, interdependent, and rational
by ecological, not simply technological, standards — we would expect that the
special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers,
and the like would be melded into a general interest in which people see them-
selves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their community and region

7

rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, citizenship
would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the
public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.

This is the moral basis of a moral economy for moral communities. But
of overarching importance is the general social interest that potentially under-
pins all moral communities, an interest that must ultimately cut across class,
gender, ethnic, and status lines if humanity is to continue to exist as a viable
species. This interest is the one created in our times by ecological catastrophe.
Capitalism's "grow or die" imperative stands radically at odds with ecology's
imperative of interdependence and limit The two imperatives can no longer co-
exist with each other — nor can any society founded on the myth that they can
be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society, or
society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Will this ecological society be authoritarian, or possibly even totalitarian, a
hierarchial dispensation that is implicit in the image of the planet as a "space-
ship" Or will it be democratic? If history is any guide, the development of
a democratic ecological society, as distinguished from a commend ecological
society, must follow its own logic. One cannot resolve this historical dilemma
without getting to its roots. Without a searching analysis of our ecological prob-
lems and their social sources, the pernicious institutions that we now have will
lead to increased centralization and further ecological catastrophe. In a demo-
cratic ecological society, those roots are literally the grass roots that libertarian
municipalism seeks to foster.

For those who rightly call for a new technology, new sources of energy, new
means of transportation, and new ecological lifeways, can a new society be any-
thing less than a Community of communities based on confederation rather
than statism? We already live in a world in which the economy is "overglobal-
ized," overcentralized, and overbureaucratized. Much that can be done locally
and regionally is now being done largely for profit, military needs, and imperial
appetites — on a global scale with a seeming complexity that can actually be
easily diminished.

If this seems too "utopian" for our time, then so must the present flood of
literature that asks for radically sweeping shifts in energy policies, far-reaching
reductions in air and water pollution, and the formulation of worldwide plans
to arrest global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer be seen as
"utopian." Is it too much, it is fair to ask, to take such demands one step
further and call for institutional and economic changes that are no less drastic
and that in fact are based on traditions that are deeply scdimcntcd in American
— indeed, the world's — noblest democratic and political traditions?

Nor are we obliged to expect these changes to occur immediately. The Left
long worked with minimum and maximum programs for change, in which im-
mediate steps that can be taken now were linked by transitional advances and
intermediate areas that would eventually yield ultimate goals. Minimal steps
that can be taken now include initiating Left Green municipalist movements that
propose popular neighborhood and town assemblies — even if they have only
moral functions at first — and electing town and city councilors that advance the
cause of these assemblies and other popular institutions. These minimal steps
can lead step-by-step to the formation of confederal bodies and the increasing
legitimation of truly democratic bodies. Civic banks to fund municipal enter-
prises and land purchases; the fostering of new ecologically oriented enterprises

8

that are owned by the community; and the creation of grassroots networks in
many fields of endeavor and the public weal — all these can be developed at a
pace appropriate to changes that are being made in political life.

That capital will likely "migrate" from communities and confederations that
are moving toward libertarian municipalism is a problem that every community,
every nation, whose political life has become radicalized has faced. Capital, in
fact, normally "migrates" to areas where it can acquire high profits, irrespective
of political considerations. Overwhelmed by fears of capital migration, a good
case could be established for not rocking the political boat at any time. Far more
to the point are that municipally owned enterprises and farms could provide
new ecologically valuable and health-nourishing products to a public that is
becoming increasingly aware of the low-quality goods and staples that are being
foisted on it now.

Libertarian municipalism is a politics that can excite the public imagina-
tion, appropriate for a movement that is direly in need of a sense of direction
and purpose. The papers that appear in this collection offer ideas, ways, and
means not only to undo the present social order but to remake it drastically
- expanding its residual democratic traditions into a rational and ecological
society.

Addendum

This addendum seems to be necessary because some of the opponents of liber-
tarian municipalism — and, regrettably, some of its acolyte — misunderstand
what libertarian municipalism seeks to achieve indeed, misunderstand its very
nature.

For some of its instrumental acolytes, libertarian municipalism is becoming a
tactical device to gain entry into so called independent movements and new third
parties that call for "grassroots politics," such as those proposed by NOW and
certain Labor leaders In the name of "libertarian municipalism," some radical
acolytes of the view are prepared to blur the tension that they should cultivate
between the civic realm and the state — presumably to gain greater public
attention in electoral campaigns for gubernatorial, congressional, and other state
offices. These radicals regrettably warp libertarian municipalism into a mere
"tactic" or "strategy" and drain it of its revolutionary content.

But those who propose to use tenets of libertarian municipalism for "tactical"
reasons as a means to enter another reformist party or function as its "left
wing" have little in common with the idea. Libertarian municipalism is not
a product of the formal logic that has such deep roots in left-wing "analyses"
and "strategies" today, despite the claims of many radicals that "dialectics" is
their "method." The struggle toward creating new civic institutions out of old
ones (or replacing the old ones altogether) and creating civic confederations
is a self formative one, a creative dynamic formed from the tension of social
conflict. The effort to work along these lines is as much a part of the end
as the process of maturing from the child to the adult — from the relatively
undifferentiated to the fully differentiated — with all its difficulties. The very
fight for a municipal confederation, for municipal control of "property," and for
the actual achievement of worldwide municipal confederation is directed toward
achieving a new ethos of citizenship and community, not simply to gain victories

9

in largely reformist conflicts.

Thus, libertarian municipalism is not merely an effort simply to "take over"
city councils to construct a more "environmentally friendly" city government.
These adherents or opponents of libertarian municipalism, in effect, look at the
civic structures that exist before their eyes now and essentially (all rhetoric
to the contrary aside) take them as they exist. Libertarian municipalism, by
contrast, is an effort to transform and democratize city governments, to root
them in popular assemblies, to knit them together along confederal lines, to
appropriate a regional economy along confederal and municipal lines.

In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity precisely from
the dialectical tension it proposes between the nation-state and the municipal
confederation. Its "law of life, " to use an old Marxian term, consists precisely
in its struggle with the state. The tension between municipal confederations
and the state must be clear and uncompromising. Since these confederations
would exist primarily in opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised
by state, provincial, or national elections, much less achieved by these means.
Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the state, strengthened
by this struggle, indeed defined by this struggle. Divested of this dialectical
tension with the state, of this duality of power that must ultimately be actualized
in a free "Commune of communes," libertarian municipalism becomes little more
than "sewer socialism."

Many heroic comrades who are prepared to do battle (one day) with the
cosmic forces of capitalism find that libertarian municipalism is too thorny,
irrelevant, or vague to deal with and opt for what is basically a form of polit-
ical particularism. Our spray-can or ' alternative cafe" radicals may choose to
brush libertarian municipalism aside as "a ludicrous tactic," but it never ceases
to amaze me that well-meaning radicals who are committed to the "overthrow"
of capitalism (no less!) find it too difficult to function politically — and, yes,
electorally — in their own neighborhoods for a new politics based on a gen-
uine democracy. If they cannot provide a transformative politics for their own
neighborhood relatively modest task — or diligently work at doing so with the
constancy that used to mark the more mature left movements of the past, I find
it very hard to believe that they will ever do much harm to the present social
system. Indeed, by creating cultural centers, parks, and good housing, they
may well be improving the system by giving capitalism a human face without
diminishing its under lying unfreedom as a hierarchical and class society.

A bouquet of struggles for "identity" has often fractured rising radical move-
ments since SDS in the 1960s, ranging from foreign to domestic nationalisms.
Because these identity struggles are so popular today, some of the critics of
libertarian municipalism invoke "public opinion" against it. But when has it
been the task of revolutionaries to surrender to "public opinion" not even the
"public opinion" of the oppressed, whose views can often be very reactionary?
Truth has its own life — regardless of whether the oppressed masses perceive or
agree on what is true. Nor is it "elitist" to invoke truth, in contradiction to even
radical public opinion, when that opinion essentially seeks a march backward
into the politics of particularism and even racism. It is very easy to drop to all
fours these days, but as radicals our most important need is to stand on two
feet — that is, to be as fully human as possible — and to challenge the existing
society in behalf of our shared common humanity, not on the basis of gender,
race, age, and the like.

10

Critics of libertarian municipalism even dispute the very possibility of a
"general interest." If, for such critics, the face-to-face democracy advocated
by libertarian municipalism and the need to extend the premises of democracy
beyond mere justice to complete freedom do not suffice as a "general interest," it
would seem to me that the need to repair our relationship with the natural world
is certainly a "general interest" that is beyond dispute — and, indeed, it remains
the "general interest" advanced by social ecology. It may be possible to coopt
many dissatisfied elements in the present society, but nature is not cooptable.
Indeed, the only politics that remains for the Left is one based on the premise
that there is a "general interest" in democratizing society and preserving the
planet Now that traditional forces such as the workers' movement have ebbed
from the historical scene, it can be said with almost complete certainty that
without libertarian municipalism, the left will have no politics whatever.

A dialectical view of the relationship of confcdcralism to the nation-state,
an understanding of the narrowness, introverted character, and parochialism of
identity- movements, and a recognition that the workers' movement is essentially
dead all illustrate that if a new politics is going to develop today, it must be
unflinchingly public, in contrast to the alternative-cafe "politics" advanced by
many radicals today. It must be electoral on a municipal basis, confederal in its
vision, and revolutionary in its character.

Indeed, in my view, libertarian municipalism, with its emphasis on confed-
cralism, is precisely the "Commune of communes" for which anarchists have
fought over the past two centuries. Today, it is the "red button" that must be
pushed if a radical movement is to open the door to the public sphere. To leave
that red button untouched and slip back into the worst habits of the post-1968
New Left, when the notion of "power" was divested of Utopian or imaginative
qualities, is to reduce radicalism to yet another subculture that will probably
live more on heroic memories than on the hopes of a rational future.

April 3, 1991; addendum, October 1, 1991

11

The Anarchist Library

October 17, 2009

Anti-Copyright .
http: / / theanarchistlibrary.org
Author: Murray Bookchin
Title: Libertarian Municipalism: An
Overview
Publication date: 1991

Retrieved on April 28, 2009 from

http: / / dwardmac.pitzer.edu / anarchist archives /bookchin /gp/ perspectives24.html

This article was originally published as the introduction to the Social Ecology Project's
Readings in Libertarian Municipalism, a collection of writings on the subject. Green
Perspectives — October 1991